


After

by brightstarlings (gingerpunches)



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Destroy Ending, Everyone Is Alive, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post Destroy Ending, Sickfic, Trans Male Character, Twin Shepards, With A Twist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:01:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22595194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingerpunches/pseuds/brightstarlings
Summary: Waiting was what they did. How they survived all of this - how they slogged through hour after torturous hour of radio silence. Shepard had always been the hero in the end, but every time he did, there had been a crew waiting to see if he’d survive.They waited just like everyone else, waiting for him to come crawling back through that airlock come hell or high water. They picked him up when he fell, every single time. They put the pieces back where they belonged and pulled him forever higher, fearless and loyal, afraid not even of failure, for they knew what true failure was like.He was failure, was death and uncertainty wrapped in one war-torn walking corpse. He had no right to earn that kind of respect, and yet every time he walked onto the bridge or passed through the mess, they smiled and nodded and said a quiet little Commander.
Relationships: Miranda Lawson/Female Shepard, Steve Cortez/Male Shepard
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	After

**Author's Note:**

> reposted because someone decided to be transphobic in the comments of the previous posting of this fic. 
> 
> if you run into someone named Mysticdreamer32, be wary of them. i dont generally call out people but what they commented was disgusting and transphobic and i wont stand for it.
> 
> otherwise, thank you for reading! mass effect has a special place in my heart, and this fic is for everyone out there that loves it as much as i do.

Once the Citadel arms open up and the Crucible comes online, everything just… _stops._

The shooting. The fleeing. The Reapers. Especially the Reapers - they just stop, dead before the prey they’d been chasing can think otherwise. Where there’s been purple lights lining their massive hulls and red eyes peeking between their limbs was now darkness, squid-like shapes drifting through space as the collective army Shepard had amassed came to a standstill in panic and confusion.

He thought maybe it’d be more profound. More of a lightshow, with the finality that always comes with a dramatic ending. Instead, there’s only the cold silence, a ringing echo of nothing after the last firework has snapped alive in the dark evening sky. 

“Sir?” 

Hackett turns to face his comms officer. She looks baffled, her screens alight with the messages of the fleets around them. Faintly, he can hear some voice chatter from her ear piece.

“Did he do it?” Hackett says instead. Everyone on the bridge comes to a complete standstill at his question, frozen where they are, listening as the comms officer’s lips curl into a smile.

“The Reapers are inert,” she says. “All signals - they’ve stopped. All sources from everywhere…” She takes a moment to look down at her screens, at the scrambling of the entire galaxy checking in to say what he knows already. She looks back up and instead of confusion, there’s relief on her face. “They’re dead.”

And that is all it takes for the stricken silence on the bridge to erupt into cheers and laughter.

Although, it doesn’t last very long. Hackett can’t stand for it.

“And Shepard?” he says, quiet, and the words themselves - that name that carries so much weight and power - strikes the laughter from everyone’s faces. They know what they have to do. The Reapers are dead, but the fight hasn’t been won just yet.

Before the comms officer can reply, she’s startled by an incoming transmission on the holo. He nods to her to let it through when he sees _Normandy’s_ name flash in reverse on her screen.

“We lost Shepard’s life sign somewhere on the Citadel spire,” Joker says by way of greeting. Now, with such an important person’s life on the line, Hackett lets it slide. “We can’t get close. Not yet.”

Hackett turns and looks out the bridge windows. The Citadel arms are closing, preventing any rescue efforts for now. _Protocol_. Hackett frowns and turns back to Joker’s shifting holographic image on the bridge display. 

“That’s never stopped you,” Hackett says. It takes everything he has not to smile at the pinched expression on Joker’s face. The pilot had been asking permission for once instead of forgiveness - surprising, given his Commander’s penchant for doing the exact opposite the entire time they’ve known each other. But Joker doesn’t need much more than that before he’s nodding and cutting the feed to audio-only, and when Hackett turns to his helmsman, he needs no further instruction, either.

The Crucible is still attached to the Citadel, its hinged arms locked onto the Citadel ring between the Citadel arms that are still closing. The beam connecting the Crucible and Citadel is gone, however, though Hackett is loath to send the go-ahead to detach it just yet. Reaper bodies drift by, big and small, and Hackett is slow to trust that this weapon really worked until he can get more confirmation. He will leave it for now, just in case.

The _Normandy_ drifts ahead of Hackett’s cruiser, the point of the spear, finding a path between debris and death through the inside of the Citadel ring. The arms cast moving shadows across everything and themselves, slow-moving petals of a flower shimmering with the lights of life on their insides. C-Sec is no doubt stretched to its limits trying to contain all the panic on the station, so Hackett sends a message to nearby fleet commanders to switch to rescue efforts on the station. His helmsman steers them after the _Normandy_ as he does, and once they reach restricted docking at the Citadel tower, he moves towards the airlock himself.

A squad of soldiers follows him, but he doesn’t think he’ll need them when he meets with Liara, EDI, James, and a roughed-up Garrus escorting Doctor Chakwas on the other end of the docking platform. They all look haggard but alert, Garrus most of all, and Hackett doesn’t feel like arguing about protocol on this particular search and rescue.

“We know they went up the beam to an unknown part of the tower,” Liara says. She smiles in greeting, but it reaches her eyes only just. Hackett nods for her to continue. “Their suits were semi-destroyed, but we got life signs from the both of them for a while before they went out. Anderson’s first, and then Shepard’s.”

“Let’s follow that data, then,” Hackett says. “You have a general location?”

Liara nods. “I do.”

“Then lead the way.”

It’s a somber affair, looking for someone. C-Sec is already here, looking after the frightened and wounded, though there is little of the second. The Reapers moved the Citadel, they didn’t invade it, and any injuries people sustained would have been from the sudden transportation of the station itself. C-Sec lets them pass into restricted areas of the tower without incident once they recognize who Hackett is, and before long, they’re ascending keeper hallways and tunnels, a spiraling network just out of reach if you didn’t know where to look. 

Ten minutes into the silence of hurrying to Shepard’s last known location brings them to a circular hallway, much like the Citadel ring, except entrances and exits keep forming and shifting, as if the place itself couldn’t decide whether to let them pass or not. Hackett recalls Shepard saying something like this over comms before the Crucible was used, but wasn’t there supposed to be —

They round the edge of the hallway, and the smell of dead bodies hits them hot and heavy. Blood and viscera slides down a ramp leading towards the inside of the ring, and once everyone has gathered enough strength to move forward and peek inside the hallway the ramp leads up into, Hackett has to focus very hard on fighting back his gag reflex. 

Bodies - piles of them - and Keepers sorting through them. He knew the Reapers were bringing people up here through the beam, knew that this was how Reapers made offspring, but this - the callousness —

Liara touches his shoulder, looking frightened herself when he turns to face her. But leading up the pathway the opposite side are bloody footsteps - two pairs of them - and a brightly-lit room up another ramp. 

There isn’t time for fear, now. Only action.

——

“Thank you, Admiral Hackett, for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer some questions.”

“They deserve answering, miss Al-Jilani. Besides, I wanted to beat you to the punch.”

“Very funny, sir. Anyway - can we speak candidly?”

“I have nothing to hide.”

“Of course. If you did, you wouldn’t be here.”

“None of us would be, but thank you. What’d you have for me?”

“Alright. Straight to the point, then - was Shepard right? Was this threat as big as it could have been?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“Many across the galaxy are wondering if the Reapers had been the ancient destructive force Shepard had been claiming them to be for five years, and not only because a significant portion of the galaxy still survives. Many are saying that this was a hoax performed by -“

“Are you familiar with Nazi Germany, Al-Jilani?”

“I’m - yes, I’m familiar with that human tragedy, sir, if that’s what your’re saying.”

“That _tragedy_ cost six million human lives, many of whom were considered other to the German state. Jews, homosexuals, rromani, immigrants, anyone considered an enemy to the new German ideal - six million of them. Would you be surprised to hear that many people thought _that_ was a hoax, too?”

“The Reapers -“

“Are a technological marvel developed by an ancient precursor race whose progeny we have made contact with. They were intended to answer a question, and that answer, when discovered, included the total annihilation of everything and everyone of _any_ space-flight capable race in the galaxy. These machines wiped out their own creators to “save” them, and continued to do so over eons to everything else that up and developed an advanced brain stem. Shepard has been the right the whole time, and whether people _believe_ it or not is irrelevant. The Reapers have come, and now they’re dead, and we will pick up the pieces and rebuild.”

“Yes. Well. The people still deserve answers, sir. They deserve facts.”

“Then I encourage them to look at the official death counts - which rise by the hundreds of thousands each week - and remember that Shepard warned us five years ago and we didn’t listen. A lot more could have been done to prevent this if we had. A lot more _people_ would have been here if we had.”

“Yes. I suppose you’re right…

… And sir? Before you go?”

“What?”

“Tell Shepard that many people also say: thank you.”

——

Shepard is seventy percent cybernetics. 

The most any one human has enhanced themselves? Fifteen percent. Some vital organs, bones, a limb or three, skin grafting and tissue replacement - cybernetics could replace a whole lot. But too much at any one time and the body begins to work against itself, fighting old against new, machine incapable of mimicking the random harmony of organic bodily functions while the body itself is bogged down by accepting and healing over mechanical wounds. There is only so much nanites can do, and at that point, nature must prevail.

But losing Shepard had not been an option for Cerberus. Losing Shepard meant losing an opportunity, and that had not been in the cards for The Illusive Man. How he gained the immense wealth he needed to bring Shepard back, no one knows. Even lucrative businessmen didn't have _that_ much money.

He moved heaven and earth to bring Shepard back, legit business practices be damned. And what was readily apparent after the success of Project Lazarus was this: cybernetics _could_ be used effectively in humans beyond that fifteen percent mark, even if it meant overriding nature herself.

Because Shepard was dead. Dead-dead. The moment that cryopod cracked open to reveal the mangled, burnt corpse of Commander Shepard, Miranda knew. The Illusive Man was asking the impossible of her, and when she set to work, she knew failure wasn’t an option.

Getting a heartbeat was hard. Getting a heartbeat from _anyone_ after their heart stops is hard, but getting one from a body so badly traumatized had been increasingly difficult. It took the rebuilding of Shepard’s tissues to get anything going, countless injections of stem cells and nanites to get anything dead - which was a lot - cleared from veins and arteries and heart valves. Stimulating muscle and brain tissue with hundreds of thousands of tiny, barely-there electric shocks, mimicking brain activity where there wasn’t any in a probably vain attempt at playing God.

In the end, she didn’t play at anything. She _was_ god - when she finally got a heartbeat, she was god; when she got brain activity, she was god; after hundreds of injections and dozens of surgeries to replace organic bone and tissue with cold metal and microscopic machines, she was _god._ She could do anything to Shepard, could make him into whatever she wanted - could push and knead him into the perfection she so desperately wanted him to be. Bigger, stronger, faster, smarter — 

But no. The Illusive Man wanted Shepard as he had been: the broken war hero. That’s how he wins hearts, The Illusive Man said. That’s how he’ll win _theirs._

So she did it. She was god, built a man from dead to dying, constructed a living being that shouldn’t have been. Shepard was better off dead, but dead tools don’t turn screws. After the chaotic awakening Shepard had when he shouldn’t have been walking, let alone conscious and using biotics with deadly accuracy a walking-dead person had no right to have, she wasn’t sure which of the two the world would be.

——

In the end, it was the screw. Shepard had always been the flathead.

——

“Is there brain activity?”

“Yes.”

“But is it high functions? Dreams, consciousness?”

“Miss Lawson, please —“

It takes everything she has not to throw something, but she doesn’t because Shepard’s crew is standing behind her, just as rattled and angry. If anyone had a right to know what was wrong with Shepard, they did - she was no longer his Frakenstein.

Miranda takes a deep breath and nods. The frazzled nurse nods as well, adjusting his datapad in his arms, and looks between the hilariously armed entourage behind her like he’s just now getting used to seeing them.

“I know you’re eager to know what’s going on,” the nurse starts gently. “But Shepard is in a very fragile condition. Much of his cybernetics are struggling to mend themselves while the organic part of his body heals. We have our best experts on this.”

At that, he looks at Miranda pointedly. She nods again. She knows Shepard best, inside and out, but she isn’t what he needs. He needs to live. Not be built from nothing to everything.

“But you’ll keep us apprised?” she asks, just as pointedly. “You won’t keep us out of the loop?”

“He has family,” he says. “But yes. You’ll know. Admiral Hackett has seen to that.”

He sounds put-off, so Miranda lets him be. He disappears into the clean room preceding Shepard’s ICU, a swish of white and plastic and heavy metal doors and he’s gone. Miranda turns back to the shuffling crew behind her and shakes her head.

“We wait, then,” she says, and they sigh.

——

Waiting was what they did. How they survived all of this - how they slogged through hour after torturous hour of radio silence. Shepard had always been the hero in the end, but every time he did, there had been a crew waiting to see if he’d survive.

Waiting was how they showed their loyalty. Their love and support. A crew that could wait was a crew that could pull the weight of stars, and that’s what Shepard had. After the death of his first, he did everything he could to protect the second.

Because he couldn’t come back to an empty ship, and he couldn’t come back to one that hated him. Many of them were Cerberus agents, once - Joker, Daniels, Donnelly, EDI. They had plenty of reasons to protect him, to wait for hours and hours of nothingness in the slight hope he’ll come home again. But the others, the bridge crew, comms officers, security, nurses - they had every reason to hate him. To watch him burn, the traitor he was. He’d done enough to bring them ruin to last lifetimes.

They didn’t, though. They waited just like everyone else, waiting for him to come crawling back through that airlock come hell or high water. They picked him up when he fell, every single time. They put the pieces back where they belonged and pulled him forever higher, fearless and loyal, afraid not even of failure, for they knew what true failure was like.

_He_ was failure, was death and uncertainty wrapped in one war-torn walking corpse. He had no right to earn that kind of respect, and yet every time he walked onto the bridge or passed through the mess, they smiled and nodded and said a quiet little _Commander._

He was more than failure, was more than betrayal. He was theirs, and together they were _Normandy,_ and waiting was the least they could do for the hell he’d gone through for them.

So they do. In shifts, mostly, because the _Normandy_ ’s attention was wanted elsewhere on Earth. She had rescue and supply missions to run with the Reapers dead, so in teams of four, they waited. All of them more than once, and all of them with the patience only a _Normandy_ officer could afford.

His squadmates wait with them. Liara, when she can, and Garrus and Ashley, always together, always sitting close together. Tali returns after weeks of seeing to her people’s progress on their home planet, a Geth platform sometimes making an appearance with her, always the same one, always so familiar, so close to the one Legion used. EDI and Joker return when they can, and James tries not to make it look like he’s as torn up as he is when he’s told no one can see Shepard still.

Zaeed, Wrex, Samara, Grunt, Jacob, Jack, Kasumi, Miranda. Adams, Westmoreland, Campbell, Traynor, Cortez. More names, more hearts, more waiting, but they don’t care. A ship is nothing without her captain, and the _Normandy_ is no exception. She does her job exceptionally well, but she - _they_ \- are nothing without him, not anymore.

——

He doesn’t die, not really. But she feels it all the same, and it takes everything she has not to collapse there on the bridge of her mother’s cruiser.

Because while Shepard didn’t want her on an active warship like the _Normandy,_ she was still valuable to the war effort. They both were. A Shepard was never not useful, and so instead of taking part in the initial skirmish, they participated in the long run. Hunting down oculus, commanding bomb runs, strafing the enemy for distractions, balancing the heft of the spear while _Normandy_ assumed the spearhead. There was much to be done in a long-winded skirmish such as this, in a last stand that could save them from extinction or make them a mystery for future races. There was much _she_ could do, but she feels the heart of her nearly give out, it’s over.

Hannah catches her, firm, gentle hands as she finally collapses like a limp doll to the warm floor. Starships are always warm - always absorbing and redistributing heat, efficiently collecting what they’re already producing. Sometimes it gives her comfort, but her skin feels too clammy and cold to appreciate it. 

“Let’s get her to my cabin,” Hannah says, quietly enough that only her yeoman hears. The rest of the bridge is politely minding their own business, but Lena can feel eyes on her anyway.

Hannah and her yeoman help Lena stumble to Hannah’s quarters, Lena’s legs like a newborn deer’s. They settle her on Hannah’s bed, careful not to drop her. Hannah turns to her yeoman, voice stern as she tells her her Captain has command for now.

“Kane?” Hannah asks when the yeoman disappears. Lena nods, every bone in her body aching, and fights very hard not to cry. 

“Do you know what happened?” she asks shakily. “The Reapers - the _Normandy?_ ”

Hannah kneels before her daughter, her sure hands wrapping around Lena’s trembling ones. Her expression is pinched, cold in a way that says she hasn’t dropped her Admiral persona just yet. Lena understands - she has to go back out there and command. Lena doesn’t.

Hannah’s hands come up and curl around Lena’s cheeks, a soft, motherly gesture that she always misses from when she was a child. 

“They’re dead,” Hannah says. “The Crucible worked. But your brother - if you reacted this way -“

She stops. They’d always been like this, two halves of a whole, less a coin and more an ouroborous, too complicated and connected to be called opposites. Lena and Kane had a connection that went deeper than even asari bonds, and now more than ever Lena feels something inside her giving out because of it. 

Kane is not well. He’s dying, or close to it. Her body feels heavy with the weight of his own.

Lena feels tired, enough that she has to lay back. Her eyes close, the corners wet with tears, and feels her body give out all at once, a light extinguishing, cold in the absence of something to warm her, her mother fluttering around her like a moth in the darkness. 

——

She comes to right where she remembers being, cushioned in the soft sheets and pillows of her mother’s bed in her cabin. The light coming through the starboard window slat is different, though, unfiltered like it shouldn’t had they been in space. It’s sunlight, warm and white through the prism of atmosphere, and she gets up to feel it on her skin.

Her body feels lighter than it did before she fell asleep, she notices. Less like it’s being pulled with weights under a churning, dark sea, and more like she’s filled with the ache of living, bones uncomfortable under her stretched-thin skin. Parts of her burn, deep inside, bone-deep, and she wonders if it’s her or her brother. 

Peering out the window slat, she sees tall skyscrapers and bustling ship activity. Shuttles land and take off from the street and rooftops, carrying debris in clamps slung onto their undersides and people safely encapsulated in their hulls. Cruisers idle high above, ports for the shuttles and protection from potential attack, and far off in the distance, its limbs sticking up like dark skyscrapers of its own amongst the still standing remnants of the city, is a Reaper corpse. 

Her heart sinks. All these people, this city, _Earth._ The reality of what’s been done sinks in finally. She hadn’t seen cities burn, hadn’t been there when Earth was attacked, hadn’t been on the front lines. Grissom Academy had been the closest she’d been - otherwise, she was here, on her mother’s ship, supporting in a way only an Admiral could during a near-extinction event. Kane, though, he’d been -

The door to the cabin hisses open, startling Lena away from the window. She sits back on the edge of her mother’s bed as Hannah ascends the short three steps to the sleeping space, her face grim but smiling. She reaches out to her daughter as Lena’s pounding heart jumps up her throat, rattling everything inside her like a loose window in its sill.

Hannah sits next to her, their palms sliding together. “It’s okay,” Hannah whispers. She leans and kisses Lena’s hair, a shift of motion that means all the world to them both. “We’re in Vancouver, just above the hospital building. Our main mission is to protect it, but -“

“Kane?” Lena croaks. 

Hannah nods. She smiles, genuine and painful. Lena never likes seeing that smile on her mother’s face. “Get dressed. His crew is already gone - well. Most of them. I think it’s time you properly met them all.”

Lena dresses in a hurry when he mother leaves, throwing on her uniform after scrubbing her face and hands. She pins up her hair into an Alliance standard bun and walks out the door afterwards, her skin itching, her feet quick across the floor. She meets her mother and her armed entourage at the shuttle prepared for them in the cruiser’s shuttlebay, and after a wordless nod from Hannah, boards. 

——

She’s met his crew, his squadmates, his family. And they are his family - not more than she and Lena, but enough that she would never split hairs over who he belongs to. They’ve seen him through much more than just the simple pains of growing up, and for that she would trade the stars for them to stay together forever. 

Lena’s met them too, but only just. A week on the _Normandy_ after being secured after Grissom Academy is not enough to know the enormity of what this crew has done for Kane Shepard, but Lena takes it with grace, as she always does. Spectre Williams greets them at the entrance to the ICU, her dress blues rumpled as if she’s slept here. Hannah wouldn’t put it past her to have been here since the day they learned of Kane’s hospitalization. 

“Admiral,” Williams greets, saluting sharply. She looks at Lena and smiles, saluting as well, though it should be the other way around. “Lieutenant.”

Hannah smiles, but her daughter doesn’t. “Is he alright?” 

Williams doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t frown, either. “What kind of answer do you want?”

“The truth,” Lena grits out. “What else would we want?”

“Patience,” Hannah chides. Lena’s jaw snaps shut, and Williams smiles a true smile.

She motions for them to follow, and after a series of turns avoiding rushing nurses and doctors, they’re taken to a suite at the end of a hallway with two guards sitting in chairs outside the door. They stand and salute, though Hannah’s eyes aren’t on them.

In a little sitting area - well, more a tiny alcove - outside Kane’s ICU room, with chairs and tables pulled together in a tight circle, are three of Kane’s crewmates. Garrus is asleep leaning back in one of the more cushioned seats, his boots propped up on the table and his hands crossed over his cinched waist. Two women she can’t see the faces of are curled together under a blanket on a tan hospital loveseat, a crop of black and red hair peeking out from the top of it as they sleep. Williams’ recently vacated seat next to Garrus is a mess of blankets and pillows, too, and when Hannah turns to look at the Spectre, she just shrugs.

“We stay in shifts,” she says. “We can’t stay inside - too many surgeries for that. But we don’t want him to wake up alone.”

“Thank you,” Lena says quietly. Hannah can only nod, her throat closing up, everything inside her pushing to cry but she fights it back. They care enough to shirk their duties helping on the _Normandy_. They care enough to stay here on the off chance Kane might wake up alone. 

Instead of saying anything else, Williams opens the door to Kane’s ICU room, holding a finger to her lips as she does. Hannah leads Lena inside, spotting Miranda Lawson across the room with a doctor first, wearing scrub whites instead of her Cerberus uniform. There’s a dark plain curtain drawn around the bed, and just inside it Hannah can hear the steady beeping of a heart monitor and IV drip controller, both too fast for any normal man’s.

It takes everything she has not to rip aside the curtain and see her son, to defer to the doctor and Miranda instead of falling into her motherly instincts. The doctor is a young thing, a woman with short cropped red hair and a nice, muted smile, and when she holds her hand out, she doesn’t shy from Hannah’s strong grip.

“Dr. Michel,” the doctor says in a thick French accent. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Admiral.”

“She’s known the Commander for four years,” Miranda says. She steps up to their little group, smiling as best she can. “He’s in good hands. You can trust her.”

“I imagine he’s also in yours,” Hannah says. She says it with a smile, and while the joke falls flat, Miranda catches her meaning and smiles graciously.

“They didn’t want me near him at first, but they had no other choice. I built him, and I won’t let incompetence kill him after everything he’s done to get here.”

The Reaper corpse is still outside the window, a faded shadow in the distance, a hulking mass of triumph Kane Shepard is to bear should he live. They all had their hand in this victory, but in this moment all Hannah feels is loss.

She nods anyway, and her daughter, ever so fierce, swallows her pride and nods as well. She brings Miranda into a firm embrace, startling them both if Miranda’s expression is anything to go by, but all Hannah sees is the blossom of love’s first flower.

“Thank you,” Lena chokes out. Hannah knows the sound of her daughter’s tears without seeing them. Miranda, though startled, hugs her tightly, _shh_ -ing and touching her hair.

“I won’t let him die,” Miranda reaffirms. “And - you’re welcome.”

Dr. Michel gives them a moment to recuperate before dragging aside the curtain separating Kane’s bed from the rest of the room. She does it quickly, like ripping off a bandaid, and instead of the shock and disgust Hannah expected to feel, she feels only heartbreak.

Her son is a handsome man, even with the scars. He does not flaunt this beauty, not now, not like he had when he was young and reckless and desperately trying to find a place in the world where he fit just right. But he knows his strengths, knows what looks on him best, knows how to turn and use that cold Shepard stare to his advantage, whether it be to quiet a room or slip into a man’s pants.

Even after Cerberus - after Miranda’s miracles - he’d retained that beauty, however ruffled and slightly askew. She didn’t get to see much of him after his revival, too busy hoisting the fate of the galaxy upon his capable, crumbling shoulders. But the cybernetics never bothered her even if she couldn’t see them, not as much as they bothered him. They’d brought her son back, afterall - how could she begrudge innovation when it’s fruits were so precious?

She sees, now, why it had bothered him, why his existence was so much more painful after Cerberus brought him back. His flesh, not unmarred, but his own, scars and all, healed nicely since he’d been found on the Citadel. His body had no problem keeping up with itself, large wounds healing into small, red scars, new and shiny and soon to be faded like all the others. His heart is strong, Dr. Michel says, and he should recover quickly once the cybernetics catch up.

And that is what pains Hannah now. The cybernetics aren’t keeping up with the body, instead leaving angry, glowing orange lines across his face and chest, nanites working furiously to repair themselves against the efficiency of an organic body having the ability to do so on its own. They bleed, and ache, and tear apart skin already mended, exacerbating small wounds into bigger ones that need more surgeries to close. For all intents and purposes, they make things worse, working against their better nature in a vain attempt to correct it.

She can’t hold back the tears then. She tentatively strokes his hair, his forehead, his high cheekbones. His skin is clammy, hot and cold and sweating, and when he breathes in, she can hear a rattle that shouldn’t be there. The oxygen and feeding tubes obstruct much of his lower face, and the thin, breathable bandages they have over his recovering wounds are blotchy with new blood.

He will live, but painfully. It’ll be a long few months before he can pass through that door to the ICU and resume his post. 

A seat is pulled up for her and she sits, holding Kane’s limp hand in both her own. Lena sits on his other side, caressing his other hand, her expression just as wet and pained as Hannah’s must be. Dr. Michel and Miranda excuse themselves, and in a swish of the door, they’re gone, leaving Hannah and Lena alone.

“We should have been there,” Lena says, strained through tears tracking quietly down her cheeks.

Hannah looks between both her children, at the sun streaming through the windows and lighting their hair from gold to white, a halo around them both. She strokes Kane’s wrist, careful around the IV cannula, and shakes her head.

“No,” she says just as quietly. “But we’re here now, and we will be for some time. We aren’t the only ones to rebuild.”

——

They visit when they can, when supply runs can run themselves and their leisurely time allows. Hannah is still an Admiral, afterall, and Lena has her students to attend to from Grissom. 

The _Normandy_ eventually docks as well - two weeks into Kane’s stay at the hospital. There isn’t much need for a stealth warship during times of recovery, and there is only so much help the head of a spear can do when a bandage is in need instead. She slings herself to Hannah’s cruiser’s underside, magnetically docked in place, protected from prying eyes and possible attack. Of course, the illusion is gone as soon as someone looks up - the _Normandy_ is a one-of-a-kind - but the possibility of anonymity brings with it a sense of calm for her crew.

Her crew doesn’t much interact with Hannah’s, though, and that is also a blessing. Hannah’s crewmates are used to bureaucracy and the careful handling of Alliance - and Council - politics, but the _Normandy’s_ is skilled in breaking them, and they all know it. For too long they’d been given the respect that comes with the loyalty to a Commander like Shepard, and Hannah wasn’t about to taint her son’s well-earned loyalty just because she wants to get to know the legendary crew behind him.

So it comes as a surprise when, a couple days after _Normandy_ ’s dock with the _Athena,_ a man slinks into Kane’s room after dusk, thinking himself hidden right until he rounds the curtain still partially pulled closed around Kane’s bed.

“Oh,” he says, a startled smile coming to his lips, his body frozen where it is just inside the curtain. Hannah raises a brow, and Lena just stares, the both of them curled together on the couch Miranda had pulled in so they could be more comfortable. 

“I can come back,” the man starts to say. “They usually let me in without fighting me, so I figured no one was -“

“It’s alright,” Hannah laughs. By the bars on his shoulders and the exhausted way he holds his shoulders, he’s one of Kane’s officers. “You can have a seat, Lieutenant.”

The Lieutenant shuffles his feet, his hands wringing together; and then he does as he’s told, pulling up a seat to sit near Hannah and Lena, but far enough away so as not to intrude on their space. He rubs his neck, his brilliant blue eyes flicking between Kane on the bed, the floor, out the window, and Hannah and Lena. Like a boy caught with his hand where it shouldn’t be. Hannah smiles, and he smiles back, although guarded.

That’s alright. She has a feeling she knows who this man is to Kane, and making him squirm is the least she could do for not properly introducing himself.

“I’m Lieutenant Cortez,” he says, as if reading Hannah’s mind. “You can call me Steve, though. I guess it’s only fair for what I’m about to say.”

——

He’s a stranger to heartbreak.

He knew his parents, grew up with them, was raised by two of the most wonderful people he could have ever asked for. His mother doted and encouraged, was there to walk him through his first steps, his first boyfriend, his first shipment to space. His father picked up the pieces of his first breakup, taught him how to find happiness in loneliness, found a man in a boy and nurtured it into kindness instead of malice. His parents did their best right up until the end, and when they passed, he wasn’t sad.

They’d done their best. He couldn’t cry because of that. He knew they’d done everything they could to prepare him for the day when they couldn’t anymore. 

No brothers or sisters meant he found meaning in friends and lovers. He was happy, even when the first few boyfriends didn’t work out, because at least the company was nice and the sex was good. Space is the only place he called home after his parents’ death, and it never let him down - never did he not find beauty in the only woman he’s ever loved.

Because space was like the sea, like those stories people told when ships sailed the great blue back on Earth. They were voyagers in their own right, discoveries abound in the great black he now called home. There’s been men and women before him in this expanse, documented occurrences of everything new and grand, but there was still more out there.

More for him. A man that had nothing had -

_Him._ Robert was the first that really mattered, in the end. The first discovery among many, but the one that really, truly mattered, deep down in the deepest pits of himself.

They’d met on a ship. Some Commander’s that he doesn’t remember, and only remembers it was a ship at all because its name was the _Shoebill._ Like the bird.

(He still laughs about it, despite everything, now).

He’d been a pilot then, and Robert a technician. Not even a planet-side one then, not what led him to his death. Just fixing computers, wrangling what Steve couldn’t ever hope to understand, lines of codes and commands in a language so foreign to anything he’s heard from a turian or asari. They’d fallen in love, as people do, found places to hide where they’d mess around like teenagers, found ways where breaking the Alliance rules didn’t matter. Like a horse to water, they’d drink their fill, push boundaries, and at the end of it, marriage was inevitable.

He was born on Earth, raised on Earth. He fell in love in space, found meaning in space, wanted to start a family in space. Robert was all he had, and he wanted it - _they_ wanted it - to be more.

But space had other ideas. Ferris Fields. The Collectors. A threat so ancient and unknowable that not even the galaxy herself could hide it away for long. They had a fifty-thousand year timer, afterall. How pathetic was that?

Fixing the _Normandy_ helped. He’d been taken from active flight duty to spare him the stress, his superiors concerned about a recently widowed man flying an expensive piece of equipment in open space. There isn’t a lot to hit out there, but there’s enough, so when he’s asked if he’d like to work on a top-secret refit project, he says yes. The work is long, hard, and consuming, and for a while, it’s enough.

Plus, it’s the _Normandy._ This ship is the most advanced piece of machinery the Alliance has, and the moment he steps onto it, he knows this’ll be enough to fill the pit in his heart.

In a lot of ways, he was right.

Unlike Robert, who was loud and boisterous and always the first to laugh, Shepard is not. Robert was soft curves and an easy smile, dark curly hair and amber skin like the last dredges of a sunset. His family were Greek descendants, an Adonis in his own right, and where he’d been dark and lean and everything Steve had come to know and love, Shepard… wasn’t.

It wasn’t nearly the love at first sight like Robert had been. He was tall and lanky, built like a swimmer, and pale like everything Robert hadn’t been. But he was attractive, with a square jaw and a nice smile, when he decided to smile at all, if ever. He was scarred and tired, a man carrying everything Steve thought he understood, and everything Steve hated.

This man could’ve stopped the Collectors that day at Ferris Fields. He could have, and didn’t. He should’ve been angry.

Instead, he was heartbroken. In love and heartbroken for the first time in his life.

It started with kindness. Shepard was kind, in ways a war-torn man like him shouldn’t have been, in ways Steve’s superiors never were. He listened, he heard, he _apologized._ “I’m sorry,” Shepard had said. They’d been drifting over a planet, passing through its shadow like a ship through the night, watching as everything around them grew bright with pinpricks of stars. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.”

He wanted to be angry. Shepard was easily the antagonist here - was easily the villain with Steve’s heart in his wicked hands. But he couldn’t, not then. Not with the earnestness of Shepard’s voice and the plea that underlied everything Shepard had said. 

_I’m tired,_ Steve heard. _I’m tired. I can’t save them all._

Things changed that night in the shadow of a whole new world. The pit in his heart got smaller, ever so slightly, just enough that it started to stop hurting.

Then there was the recording. The memorial wall. An uttered conversation consisting of the words “just try, for me”, that meant more to Steve than any words of encouragement ever could. He had James, and friends from before, but Shepard’s quiet stability brought up something inside him that he hasn’t felt since that day he saw Robert for the first time.

A man worth fighting for. A man who, at the end of the day, would pick up the pieces of him while his own lay scattered. 

A man he was in love with.

At the end, he wasn’t heartbroken at all. He was broken, and not entirely whole, but there were pieces of him that Shepard had. They reciprocated, completed each other in a way that he hadn’t been since the first time he kissed Robert. His first, truest love had been Robert. But Robert would want him to be happy, wanted him to shed that anchor and be free for discovery. 

Shepard was his second, truest love. Not broken, not lost. He’s never known heartbreak, not now and not then.

He’s whole.

——

“I want to see him.”

It takes everything he has not to yell. Miranda visibly holds back a smart remark as well, her fists clenching, jaw jumping. 

“I’m doing everything I can,” she says tightly. “They only just allowed me to help.”

“I can’t let the last of him I see be through a fucking hologram,” Steve seethes. And just like that, the anger drains out of him, replaced only with bone-deep sorrow. “Please. I’m begging.”

He isn’t the begging type. Not anymore. Not if it’s outside the little, rare moments where the only thing separating himself from Kane is air and atoms. He knows this. Miranda knows this. And just like that, she stops.

“I’ll do what I can,” she says softly, still stern in tone but less hot than before. “But he’s in bad shape. Give me time, Lieutenant. Please.”

She isn’t the begging type, either. He takes that moment of vulnerability and cradles it close - she wouldn’t have shown it otherwise, this woman who has seen horrors untold. “Alright. I’ll wait.”

The thank-you that passes between them is wordless, and with it Steve leaves to try and make himself useful. He’s still a pilot, afterall, and there’s a lot of people that need saving besides the one that needs it the most.

He spends the next couple weeks impatiently doing the work Hackett assigns him, running rescue drops as the _Normandy_ acts as an emergency shuttle between major cities left in ruin and smaller towns left relatively untouched. These places grow quickly, once-small, tight knit communities forced to expand to accommodate the misplaced and wounded. Hackett doesn’t have them handle the dead, but he knows if he could see those numbers, he wouldn’t want to be the people who had to.

Besides, flying is anathema to his frayed, distracted nerves. The shuttle moves like a part of him, an extension of will that he feels slipping with every day gone by without better news from Miranda. Kane is strong - Kane is a Shepard - but a man built from the dead to the living could only withstand so much punishment. Miranda does her best, but even God sometimes has to let the dice fall where they lie.

In the end, however, the news he does get is not of Kane waking, but of Admiral Anderson. Somehow, some way, a man wakes from the dead without the aid of cybernetics, and Steve’s world comes crashing down all over again.

“I understand you were close,” Anderson croaks. His voice is wrecked from misuse, from weeks of being fed and watered through a tube. Steve wants to throw up, but he nods. Anderson was everything to Shepard. He had no reason to hide.

“I love him,” he says instead of anything else that’s more appropriate. Anderson is like Kane’s father. He dips his chin, averting his gaze from this tired man before him, but he feels no shame. Anderson, when he finally does meet his gaze, looks at him with understanding instead of pity.

“That’s a tough man to love,” he says. “And not because of where we are right now.”

“But I wanted you to know,” Steve says. “You’re like a father to him. I couldn’t be there for him like you were on the Citadel. I just… wanted you to know.”

Anderson is nodding before he finishes. He looks more amused, now, a smile on his battered face that seems to cause him pain despite it. “Well, then you have my blessing. And my assurance that he’ll be fine.”

The urge to cry is back again, and unlike the other multitude of times he battled it off after the war ended, he finds it hard not to. Tears blur his vision, blinding him to what’s in front of him, leaving no choice but to squeeze them shut and face the visions of what could have been. He wasn’t there when they’d dragged Kane and Anderson onto the _Normandy,_ wasn’t brave enough to face another man he loved lifeless and broken. He’d hidden in the back of the shuttle, hands shaking as he desperately tried not to hear Doctor Chakwas’ demands to be taken to Earth, to find an intact hospital, to find _something_ to bring Shepard back.

He was a coward, and as cowards do, he’s come begging for forgiveness to the one person he may have left.

Anderson gives him space, politely looking away while Steve struggles to compose himself. No tears track down his cheeks, but it’s a near thing. He scrubs his eyes with the heels of his palms and tries very hard not to embarrass himself any more than he has in front of the Admiral, but somehow the other man is already ten steps ahead of him.

“There’s nothing you should feel bad about, for not being there,” Anderson says quietly. “Some things are just - too much to be seen.”

Steve suddenly wants to kick something, to scream and yell, the anger boiling up under his skin foreign to him just seconds ago. How could he have been this transparent? Was it that hard to see that a man in mourning was a man in hiding as well? 

Anderson doesn’t let him sit there and rage, his broken voice filtering through the haze even as Steve fights it. “Have patience. He’s not an easy man to kill. He might be waking up right now - you never know.”

It’s all that it takes, in the end, to push to see him. He knows there are infection risks, knows it will take time, but when Kane is well enough to receive visitors, he wants to be there. He wants to touch his hand and his hair, wants to see for himself what he was too afraid to before. He wants to overcome the heartbreak inside him and fight for something more than just survival for once in his adult life.

Miranda is reluctant, as she should be, but once the risk of infection has gone down - once his open wounds are more or less closed, she means - he’s allowed inside. Doctor Michel opens the door for him, Doctor Chakwas follows them in, and Miranda is waiting for them just inside, a datapad in her arms, one she proffers to him like a ring on a pillow.

“All of his records and procedures thus far,” she says, quiet and apologetic, “and ones to come.”

The list is long. He doesn’t read it, only tucks it under his arm with a nod. The bed on one side of the room is sealed behind a dark curtain, blocking whatever light the dim room cannot absorb. The curtains across the windows are closed off too, and the lights embedded in the ceiling emit only the smallest amount, just enough to see by. 

Just enough to see the body laying on that bed once Miranda shirks aside the curtain.

He’s small, smaller than he is when he’s awake and working. Kane is a tall man, capable of grand and terrible things, but now, surrounded by machines and ensconced in tubes, he’s small. A chair waits for Steve at his bedside, angled towards the head of the bed, and it takes everything he has not to collapse into it. His hands, so sure when working on the shuttle or flying across the procurement terminal, shake when he raises them to touch Kane. He’d never been shy of touching him, never felt the need to hide what he meant to him, to each other - but the first brush of skin is like the first kiss anyway, timid and unsure, the unsettling twist of birds wheeling in a strong wind.

Kane doesn’t respond. He wouldn’t have - he’s doped up on so many painkillers it’d kill a horse before helping anyone other than himself. But the feel of his skin is nice, dry and cool as it is, and when he wraps his fingers around Kane’s wrist, he can feel a steady, strong pulse.

It settles him, despite everything. To know that even as broken as he is, that Kane is alive. He may still die, but right now, he’s here, and Steve isn’t going anywhere.

A well-manicured hand slides over his shoulders, and if he hadn’t known there were others in the room, he would’ve jumped. Miranda’s hair brushes the top of his head, and for the briefest of moments she is hugging him. They don’t know each other that well, but it’s enough, and when she moves away, he misses her warmth.

Feet shuffle across the laminated floors and then the door opens and closes, taking with it the courage Steve had tried to keep bellowing under his ribs. The fire dies out without someone in the room watching, waiting for him to break, and in one quick moment, tears track hotly down his cheeks.

He’s always been an easy crier, but now it burns more than anything. He holds Kane’s hand, feeling a pulse, feeling _life,_ and can’t for the life of him bring himself to stop. It’s the only moment he’s had truly by himself - the _Normandy,_ for all her nooks and crannies, is not private. The Captain’s cabin feels so empty without Kane, and there isn’t much else he can go where the presence of him doesn’t permeate. 

It hurts, somehow, much more. A small part of him wishes Kane had just died - at least he knows how to deal with that. Instead, he’s here, barely, and when he lays his head down on Kane’s bed against his side, he tries desperately to squash that part of himself before it can get a firm hold and shake him apart.

——

Days pass like that. Fly a mission with the _Normandy,_ shuttle the injured to hospitals and supplies to starving cities, and then return, Kane’s hospital bed a port in a storm, the eye of the hurricane. Others come and visit, too, and after a while, he copes.

Until he comes in, mood lighter than usual, and spots two blonde women curled up on the fold-out family bed next to Kane’s. 

It occurs to him that Kane has a family - _duh._ He has parents, and a sister, and of _course_ they’d want to come see him after… everything. A distant memory floats back from before, this same blonde woman stepping off a Cerberus shuttle with a gaggle of kids (because that’s what they were, at their core - biotics all the same, weapons in the employ of the Alliance, but children in every sense of the word). Kane and this woman looked alarmingly alike, and while his Commander had been fond and friendly to this woman, he’d whisked her away as quickly as she’d come, somewhere far away and safe from the front that came rushing closer and closer to them each day. 

Both women sitting on this couch are near-spitting images of Kane. The woman on the right is older, with a kind, severe face and her platinum-blonde hair tied back in an appropriate bun. The same woman from a while ago sits next to her, young and obviously the daughter, looking much more wary and confused.

The both of them, he realizes, are staring at him like the stranger he is. He bows his head, trying to fight the panic off with a smile. He isn’t the praying type, but as he crosses the room to introduce himself, he prays that Kane’s family is okay with a lot of things very quickly if he wishes to stay in this room and see his lover through this.

——

She’d known, tangentially, what her son would get up to on a ship alone.

It’s something she thinks about a lot in reference to both her children. They’re strong, confident people who, in the wake of receiving affection, shy from it. She supposes they’ve learned it from herself - being raised by a single mother who sought no other probably gave them a skewed version of the world where they had to survive it alone.

She’s happy to see that they won’t. Even if Kane never wakes, he’s had a connection that wasn’t his family or his crewmates, and Hannah is happy for its existence. Steve is a nice man, sad and rudderless as he is right now, but she can see what Kane sees, and it’s more than enough. When Steve finishes explaining, she touches the top of his hand, pleased that his immediate reaction is to flip it around and take hold of her fingers gently. 

“Thank you,” she says. Steve is still smiling, albeit tightly. She’s caught him off guard. “Thank you for everything.”

Lena has softened at this point, too. She looks at her brother, broken and asleep, and nods her own gratitude. Words are surprisingly hard for her lately, and Hannah doesn’t push her.

“I’m just sorry I didn’t get to him sooner,” Steve says. The joke lands, barely, and Hannah smiles wider.

“Miranda brought him back once,” she says. “I’m confident she can do it again.”

With that, they share comfortable silence. Hannah releases Steve so he can resume his spot next to Kane, and she tries not to eavesdrop on the one-sided conversation he has with her son. A lot of it is _Normandy_ specific, anyway, which makes it easy to ignore. What goes on on a ship is normally her business, but she’s willing to give _Normandy_ a break from scrutiny for now.

Miranda returns, and with her comes Lena’s ability to speak. Her daughter practically leaps from the couch, bounding to Miranda in three quick steps, speaking before the other woman is able to get a word in on her daily update.

“Any news?” Lena asks impatiently. Miranda smirks, though only just, and holds the datapad out to her.

“Your blood transfusion helped things along,” Miranda says, looking pointedly at Lena. Lena’s complexion reddens. 

“What’s the point in being a twin if you can’t give up a pint of blood or two? What’s next? A limb?”

Miranda huffs and shakes her head. Her tone is quiet, and Steve turns, suddenly more interested in the shift of Miranda’s attitude than before. Lena looks up from her datapad as well, her body stiffening, anticipation clear in the line of her shoulders.

Hannah knows what Miranda’s going to say, and yet her heart thuds faster than it has in a long time. It feels a little like hope, and for once, Hannah clings to it tighter than she has anything else in her life.

“We’re taking him off sedation,” Miranda starts, quiet. Still her words ring like a booming echo in an empty room, and Hannah’s world finally, _finally_ rights itself. Miranda continues, looking between the three of them carefully. “We want you to be here when we do. And to gain your consent.”

“Yes,” Lena blurts. She slaps a hand over her mouth, then drops it, her shoulders scrunching up as she looks back at Hannah. Hannah can only nod, the breath stolen from her. 

“Yes,” Lena says again, more sure, quiet and firm. “Please. You have our consent.”

Miranda nods, and has Hannah and Lena sign waivers. Steve, stricken silent, watches, his hand never having left Kane’s even when he turned his seat around. 

Hannah drifts to Kane’s other side, her hands outstretched to smooth back his hair as she sits in one of the seats her and Lena have pulled up at his bedside. Miranda leaves to process the waivers, and before long, she returns. Lena sits at Hannah’s elbow, the both of them holding their breath as Miranda reaches above Kane’s bed and unhooks the drip feeding sedatives to his IV.

It takes a lot to keep Kane Shepard asleep, but it takes a lot to wake him, too. Hannah waits, a ship in stormy waters, never quite righting herself any which way as Kane’s breathing eases from the slow, deep inhales of deep, dreamless sleep. His wounds are closed, his body is healing, and for the first time in a long time he looks like the boy he was a long time ago, begging for his mother to kiss him to sleep. He’d never been small, nor afraid, not even as a child, but now she sees in him that boyish fear, that haunting ghost hanging over him as senses return. His breathing becomes more hitched, his head tilts across the pillow, and for the first time in weeks his eyelids flutter with movement behind them. 

Her boy is alive. She is finally whole.

It still takes hours. Lena is patient for the first time in her young life, waiting beside Hannah with her hands clutched in the soft blankets next to Kane’s thigh. Steve watches on, expression carefully blank, and Hannah can read in him a sorrow so deep and painful she wonders just how long he’s been waiting for a moment like this. Maybe forever, and for the first time in her life, she feels as if she’s intruding in her son’s business.

But the feeling dissipates when Steve’s eyes finally glance up to meet hers. They’re sad, and tired, and contain so many questions she wonders how many he has etched on the inside of his skin. She tries to provide some answers, tries to find words that match the things she knows to be true in moments like this. Be strong, stand together, love with all your heart. Be available, trust me, never stop loving him no matter how much it hurts. All of these things she tries to convey to him, and after a long, torturous moment of staring into those blue eyes, she thinks maybe it got across.

And then Kane is shifting, a full-body sieze not too different from a drawstring pouch bunching together when its strings are pulled. His grip in Hannah’s hand goes from slack to suddenly painful, but just like Steve across from her, she doesn’t let go. Steve’s hands are upon her son in an instant, his free hand touching Kane’s face, his forehead, his jaw, his pulse - it occurs to her this may not be the first time he’s waited at Kane’s bedside. When a rough, broken groan sounds from her son’s throat, and Steve is there, _shshing,_ his gentle, worn fingers parting back Kane’s sweat-damp hair, Kane stilling under that touch, she thinks maybe she’s right. 

But then - his _eyes._ Blue, like ice, like water slowly curling and drifting along a salt-fresh barrier. A brilliance as pale as a white dwarf, and oh, how Hannah has missed those eyes. They know so much for being so young, have seen what she has only seen in blurry vids and shaky debriefs. She thinks, not for the first time, that her son is too much like Ares, too much like the god of war to not seem so ancient and knowable in all there is to know about killing. And yet, even as she sees that war in his eyes, they are gentle, like his slowly slackening grip in her own, and she knows that fight within him has been tempered by all that horror she’s only heard described. Only a warmind could know so much and be gentled by it, and only in her son and daughter does she see what war could temper if given the time to torture them. 

Hannah waits, holding her breath, as Kane’s eyes open over the span of several minutes. There is no recognition there, not for a while - only the haze that comes with waking in a hospital and not having any recollection of getting there. He moves after a while, testing his fingers, his toes, stretching limbs and cracking his neck, getting used to inhabiting a body after spending so much time asleep. And then there _is_ recognition there, a glint of something like her son, and he’s doing everything he can to sit up to get a good look at the people surrounding his bed.

Steve’s hand lands gently on his chest and pushes him back down. Kane blinks at him, confusion and wonder plain on his face - Hannah’s heart squeezes at the sight of it. Steve is still sad, still holding the ghost of someone over his expression, but he’s smiling, and Kane has eyes for no one but him.

“The crash,” Kane croaks. His voice is broken, disuse and trauma shattering the once-beautiful tenor sound of a voice she cherished. Steve shakes his head, his hand still gently resting over Kane’s heart. It’s only then that Hannah realizes Kane is confused - and then her soul shatters all over again.

“This isn’t the _Normandy_ ,” she says finally. Her son’s gaze wheels around to her, and the lost look he gives her breaks her further. “No one died. The _Normandy_ is fine. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

He doesn’t look quite convinced. Steve’s hand on his chest ventures further up, taking Kane’s chin in a soft grip and turning his head to the left. Miranda waves from her spot next to him, and Hannah watches, painfully amused, as realization dawns on her son’s face.

He didn’t die in the _Normandy_ crash. This isn’t his resurrection two years ago. He’s on Earth this time, surrounded not by fire and explosions but a small, worried family. Steve’s grip loosens on his chin, and in the same movement, he’s standing up, leaning over the bed rail to kiss Kane sweetly and softly on the mouth. 

Hannah can breathe after that. In one kiss, she sees her son again, whole and unworried, freed from the weight he’s carried for so long. She sees now what he fights for as the room opens and the entirety of his crew fills it, cramming themselves in shoulder to shoulder, aliens and humans alike. Everyone who has carried her son this far resides here in the same moment, and even if she took a picture she’s sure she wouldn’t have believed just how many smiles were on their faces. 

They cared, just like she did, whether Kane lived or died. They wanted him to survive not just as their Commander and Captain, but as a friend and brother, too. They needed to see that their family was whole and intact too, just like hers. 

She stands up, and while she carries the rank of Admiral upon her shoulders, she has been nothing but a mother right up until this very moment. When she gets up and they all turn to look at her, she sees in their eyes that she still is.

——

The room clears after Hannah thanks his crew, one by one, with hugs and handshakes and gentle kisses to knuckles and brows. His crew is thankful, and worried, and they each take turns coming to him to wish him well. He wants to get up, to follow them out to the _Normandy_ , but the machines monitoring him keep him in place. He resigns himself to their pity and watches them go with longing, until the room is just his family - biological and found, but just the same to him.

He blinks against the bright lights, and in an instant they’re turned down. The bed is uncomfortable, his body still stiff from lying down, and he’s adjusted with careful hands and kind words. His throat cracks and his lips are dry and before he can say a word, the cool tip of a metal straw is pressed to his lips. Anything he wants, it’s given, and still he feels like a bull trapped in a pen waiting to buck out into an arena. 

Thankfully, his family senses this. Lena’s hands are cool on his own, whereas Hannah’s and Steve’s are warm and calloused. It feels good, in a stilted way, like being talked down from a ledge or laid gently on a bed of shifting sand. Not stable, not easy, but good in that there’s someone there watching him, waiting for something to come and surprised when it doesn’t.

It’s just as well that it isn’t him that breaks the silence. 

“You shouldn’t have let me leave the _Normandy,_ ” Lena says, voice brittle with tears despite the smile she’s trying to put on her face. 

He squeezes her fingers in his own, watches as she grips him just as hard. He can’t imagine what she feels, seeing him here, seeing what could have been had it been her - then again, he probably can. 

Heartbreak. Betrayal. A sense of love so strong that he’d be nearly full to bursting. 

He looks at her and sees what she sees, and shakes his head. 

“I’m glad I did,” he croaks. She doesn’t look away, but real tears fall this time. He wipes them from her cheek despite the pull of the IV in his wrist. “One of us has to stay pretty.”

Steve snorts, and Hannah shakes her head. It’s only then that it sinks it - that he’s here, alive, despite everything. That his crew is here, his family is here, that they all made it through this in one piece and —

It’s done. It’s over. He looks over at Steve with panic welling up his throat, and finally they’re —

Steve smiles, broken and happy, and rubs a hand up Kane’s bicep to his shoulder, fingers brushing his jaw. “A crash couldn’t kill me. You’re stuck with me now.”

And that’s when it finally sinks in. Steve’s skin touching his, when the last time had been just a quick, chaste kiss before disembarking the shuttle for what seemed like the last time, so many weeks ago. Steve had delivered him to hell safely every time, carried in the belly of that shuttle - so many times did he have the opportunity to die and didn’t because of this man’s skill. All of it nearly for nothing when Steve got shot down, and only now does he realize how close they’d come.

He looks out the window and sees corpses, hulking, looming things, shadows he sees even when he closes his eyes. For so long his life has been one thing, and to see it dead, to see it gone forever, does he realize now he has a life to live. 

A family to protect. A lover to build a home with. A galaxy to put back together.

He looks back towards his family and sees what they see, and finally he understands. Hannah’s hands find his, and in the broken turn of her smile, he sees the hope the galaxy had seen in him.

“Let us do the fixing this time,” she says. She leans over her daughter and kisses him gently on the cheek, careful of scars and bruises. “Let us rebuild what you’ve given us.”

He sees, now, through eyes unclouded. No longer do they live in the shadows of ghosts - now they rebuild in the light of a dawning day. 

——

“Baby steps.”

“Shut up.”

Lena snorts, though doesn’t lose her grip on her brother. His hips are skinny and his ribs are poking through his skin - she says as much, and earns a bony elbow to her shoulder.

“I just don’t see what Steve likes,” she continues, tone put-upon. “All these poky bits - he must like getting kicked in the shins with your long legs.”

Kane almost shoves her away, but then he’d fall, and he visibly thinks better of it. He adjusts his grip on the rail along the wall, using it to shift his weight as he walks. Relearning to use his legs will take time, but already he’s shown progress, and he’s only been up and around for a couple days. 

“I guess I could say the same for you and Miranda,” Kane bites out. “You’re kinda pointy yourself y’kno — _ow!”_

He shoves her off for real then, cradling his side where she’d pinched him. He glares as she laughs and dances off, trying very hard not to fall down onto the matted floor and laugh. He releases the rail and sinks to the floor, curling up his long legs in front of him like a shield. 

“Shouldn’t beat up broken people,” he mumbles, still glaring.

She huffs, still unable to stop laughing. “C’mon. It was just a pinch.”

“You said yourself I’m all bone.” 

He’s pouting now, in the same way he smiles and frowns and glares: with barely any expression at all. She rolls her eyes and sinks to her knees in front of him, careful not to get too close. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t bully you right now.”

He squints at her.

“I mean it!” she says, throwing her arms up in exasperation. “Y’know what Steve’ll do to me if you come back more black and blue than usual?”

“Probably dump you out an airlock,” Kane says. He’s smirking now, which is good - she’s forgiven. 

She snorts and gets up, holding a hand out to help him. He takes it; she tries not to notice how light he is when she pulls him up. “How would he do that planetside?”

Kane shrugs. “He’ll find a way,” he says airily. “Shuttle pilot, remember?”

He really won’t do anything - Steve is nothing if not gentle, and while she only just met him, she’s sure he’d do nothing. Not that she would do anything, anyway. Maybe some light pinching, a punch or two.

Y’know. Things Kane deserved for nearly leaving her behind. 

Her silence stretches on and Kane takes it for what it is. He wraps an arm around her shoulders again and resumes his walk down the long wall of the gymnasium, his bare feet padding softly on the cushioned floor. His steps are metered, as if he has to force his legs to do what he wants them to do, and even with Lena holding him up, he still trails a hand along the wall to counter-balance his weight. They make it around the wide room two times before Kane gets tired, and without saying a word, Lena leads him back to his hospital room. 

Unlike the awkwardness of a silence between friends, theirs is comfortable, knowing. Kane still hasn’t talked much about what happened on the Citadel, at least with his family and friends - only Anderson and Hackett have been briefed for now. He holds everything close to his chest in the way a wounded man desperately tries to hold leaking blood inside his body, and in a way, she understands. The _Normandy_ crash wasn’t that long ago for him, and to wake up in a hospital again after something just as traumatizing?

She understands, now, why he’s so quiet. Why he has a hard time putting into words exactly what he’s thinking. For a long time, she thought it’d been the Alliance. Now, she understands it was everything. 

\----

She meets Miranda for the first time in Kane’s hospital room.

It was nowhere near love at first sight, of course. Her mother was there. Doctor Michel was there. There’d been a pain so deep inside her that went further than just physical - she’d been feeling what her brother had felt, and while Miranda had been a sight for sore eyes, Lena couldn’t take hers off the broken body of her twin in that bed. 

The second meeting had been an accident. Lena had barged into Kane’s room, needing comfort from a sleeping ear. Miranda, if she’d been the scaring type, might have startled from where she was standing at Kane’s side. Instead, she turned to face Lena calmly, looking every bit like the professional she was as one of Kane’s many doctors. 

Miranda was shrouded in a white lab coat and bent over her brother with a needle in her hand, a look of concentration on her face that crinkled her eyes just so. Lena would be lying if she’d said she didn’t find her to be everything she wanted to find. But they’d just met, like strangers do, and continued to do, as Kane’s needs brought them to know their own. 

“You’re his sister,” Miranda says. Lena blinks and nods, holding out her hand.

“Thanks for the introduction,” she says dryly. “Didn’t know I was at such a disadvantage.”

Miranda grimaces. She takes Lena’s hand and squeezes her fingers instead of shaking it. “I’m sorry. I know a lot about you.”

She says it so matter-of-factly that Lena nearly laughs. But then she remembers who, exactly, she’s talking to, and the look on her face once she realizes this must be bad enough for Miranda to retract her hand and pointedly put down the needle on a tray next to Kane’s bed. 

“I’m here to help,” Miranda says placidly. “I helped him before. When we both worked for - _with_ Cerberus. I brought him back, and I’m here to do it again.”

Lena blinks. She knew about Miranda, in the weird, abstract way you know a person exists but you don’t know, exactly, who they are or what they do or how big of an impact they’ve really had on your life. Kane came back all those months ago, back from the dead like he shouldn’t have, and Lena had always known it was because of Miranda.

Seeing her brother again after two years thinking he was dead had solidified an odd trust in her for Miranda - but not really _for_ her. More for the abstract version of Miranda she had constructed in her head. This woman she hadn’t met brought her brother back, but so did a small army of doctors and surgeons and a legion of robots. She was grateful to them, but only in the way a person is grateful for an answered prayer.

But being here, seeing Miranda, seeing her here over her brother, solidifies those feelings, makes them feel _real._ Her brother is here because of _her,_ because of Miranda Lawson, and somehow that makes this moment feel more profound than it probably should be.

Lena reaches out and carefully touches her brother’s hand resting on top of the sheets, trails her fingers up his forearm, over scars and covered wounds and the barest flecks of blood left over from recent surgeries. She watches his chest rise and fall with hitched breaths, watches as Miranda slowly picks up the needle again and inserts it into one of the many tubes plugged into Kane. She depresses the plunger, and Lena feels her heart give a little squeeze with the care Miranda shows for her brother.

“Testosterone,” Miranda says, following Lena’s stare. She caps the needle and drops it in the biohazard bin hanging on the wall as realization dawns over Lena. Her chest constricts and her heart beats a little faster, a bird’s wings flapping across her ribs. Miranda may have been a trained killer, but she was kind, too, in ways unknowable to anyone but Lena, now. Just this little moment of unasked kindness in this bleak, sterile room, hidden away from anyone else but the two of them.

Lena finds it hard to speak, suddenly, so she just nods. Miranda smiles, small and private, and moves to leave, graceful in a way only someone like her can be. Lena snatches her wrist, looks into her eyes, begging her to just _stay,_ to live and grieve in this moment with her, and after only a moment of staring into those beautiful brown eyes, she sees acquiescence there. 

For days after, they sit and quietly talk, sometimes in the crowded hospital cafeteria and sometimes in the quiet of Kane’s room. Miranda inexplicably knows when his crew isn’t around, so for hours they have the room to themselves, the sound of Kane’s beating heart on the monitor an accompaniment to their hushed conversation. It’s like that for a long time, hidden away like that small gesture of love from Miranda to Kane, a precious gem hidden in the silt of possible discovery. Lena likes it this way - Miranda is more candid when no one is around, more likely to snort when she laughs and grimace when she cries.

Which she does - quite often - because Kane is like a brother to her, too. She raised him from the dead and now she doesn’t know if he’ll make it. They spend a lot of time comforting each other after that comes out, wrapped up together in blankets and trying very hard not to wake the one person they’re not sure is ever able to anymore. 

Miranda provides stability, too. In her presence and schedule. Hannah leaves to attend to her ship, and Lena’s kids are in the capable hands of Kahlee Sanders, so Lena has a lot of downtime while she waits. Miranda comes and goes, leaving to consult with Kane’s army of doctors and surgeons and to relay information to his dry-docked crew. Lena makes friends with them too, tries in her own, heart-broken way to understand why her brother would give up everything for them. Miranda helps her understand, too, and by the end of the third week of waiting, she probably knows better than anyone what could drive a man to die for one of the most loyal and honest group of people she’s ever met.

Because Miranda is part of that, too. She’s part of why Kane gave up himself as sacrifice - she’s a portion of the answer she’s been searching for since she felt his presence in her sever nearly forever. Miranda is one of many reasons why Kane went up to the Citadel and saved them from extinction, and after weeks of spending time with her, Lena thinks she’d do the same, had their roles been reversed. 

She’d do it all, she realizes. Because Miranda is kind, in a way a person who has has to be angry and unforgiving for most of their lives can be. She brings flowers to freshen up Kane’s room and takes Lena to lunch in restaurants around the hospital that either survived the Reapers or rebuilt quickly enough to start again. She requisitions expensive tea and Kane’s hormones and hard to find items like chocolate - she finds the time amongst her busy schedule to sit with Lena and help her understand the man her brother has become in the time they’ve been apart, helps her sort through the heartbreak of seeing him here when the last time she saw him he’d been laughing and smiling and telling her that everything would be alright, that he wouldn’t let anything happen to her.

He was right, in the infuriating way he typically was. He didn’t let anything happen to her. The world kept spinning, the galaxy started rebuilding, and for the first time in a long time Lena can breathe. And when she meets Steve for the first time and sees what it truly means to fight for what you love, she looks at Miranda and thinks, _I can do that, too._

——

Their first kiss is small, and afraid, and borne from several hours of hushed tears in the dark of Kane’s room. 

Hannah had already gone, away to her duties as an admiral and liaison to Hackett. Kane’s crew were on the _Normandy_ , hidden from the prying eyes of the public and Lena’s heartfelt attempts to get to know them. They were alone, as they usually were, but that night, it’d been different.

The lights of Vancouver shimmered outside the window, bouncing off the sheen of Miranda’s black hair, lighting her from two sides as she sat sideways on the loveseat, her long legs curled up under her, leaning her shapely cheek on her hand as she watched Lena compose herself. It came naturally, then, to lean in, to take that cheek in the cup of her own hand, and kiss her as she’d imagined so many times before.

Miranda didn’t respond, but their second kiss came on the heels of that confusion. They had to stop themselves from going any further lest Kane really wake - and honestly, Lena didn’t want to make out in her brother’s hospital room. 

Instead of the shy guilt she expected to see on Miranda’s face when they parted, she saw warm comfort, a smile so wide she could see Miranda’s crooked teeth and a glint in her dark eyes that hadn’t been there before. Their third and fourth kisses happened on a walk around the hospital the next day, the fifth after a long, complicated surgery where Kane was nearly lost, Miranda’s upper lip coated in a sheen of sweat and Lena smelling questionable after going two days without a shower. The sixth, the seventh, the tenth, the hundredth - every kiss after that, she lost count. After the first, she knew there’d be too many to keep track. 

——

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

Hannah’s voice is knowing, her smile predatory as she pointedly doesn’t look up from her datapad. Kane is sleeping, turned on his side as much as he can and snoring away after a long couple hours of physical therapy. He’ll be out for hours, but Lena still tries to keep her choking to a minimum as she swallows down her cup of coffee that her mother so rudely interrupted.

“Excuse me?” Lena croaks instead of answering. Hannah hums, wiggles her toes underneath the blanket draped over her lap, her eyes never leaving the datapad in her hands. Lena pointedly doesn’t continue, instead opting to get up and rinse out her cup in the sink on the other side of the room.

Hannah hums again, and Lena can feel her stare on the back of her head. “Neither of you were very good at hiding things from me,” she says lightly. “Just so you know.”

“Kane kept Steve from you,” Lena deadpans. She fills her cup with water and returns to her spot, curling up next to her mom as if she wasn’t blushing clear up to her ears.

“Who said I was talking about relationships?” 

Lena chokes again as she sips from her water. She sets the cup down, abandoning getting a drink for now, and turns to look at Hannah, her mother’s smile wide and amused.

“Would you be mad if I said recently?” Lena sighs. Better late than never, right?

Hannah shrugs. “How recent?”

Lena shrugs, too. “Like. A couple weeks?”

“Do you think you love her?”

“A little early to tell, mom,” Lena winces. 

“Never too early to tell,” Hannah says, but she isn’t sad or disappointed. Not at all, in fact, if the warm grin still pulling at her lips is anything to go by. 

Lena smiles, then, and leans over to rest her head on Hannah’s lap. Hannah’s fingers card through her hair, a warm, familiar presence that settles her, and watches as Kane’s shoulder moves up and down with each breath.

“Thank you, mom,” she says quietly, and the fingers continue to move soothingly through her hair. 

“I could never deny either of you a little bit of happiness,” her mother says, and she knows right then that everything will be alright. 

——

“I’m proud of you.”

Said on the heels of a broken breath, rattling in and choking out, resignation filling a man that should feel nothing but resolution. Anderson goes still next to him and he wonders when, exactly, any of this pain will ever stop. 

He’s still breathing, sure, but it aches, every bone in his body protesting every molecule that moves within him. His armor scrapes against his cut skin, rough and catching on bleeding wounds, blackened and smelling of ash. He knows, vaguely, that he’s going to die, that he’s on the verge of giving up. He knows, bleakly, that he’s never going to get up from this place and see the stars again. 

_I’m proud of you._

He should feel sad, or angry, or any multitude of things for what’s happened to him thus far. He should feel regret over lying to Steve - he should feel guilt for telling Joker that he’d protect everyone until the end. He should feel something moving inside him, a great weight pushed up a hill, a massive wound finally closing, a chapter in a book finally ending - _anything_ that tells him he’s done, he’s dying, _let me rest._

Instead, he’s just tired, and while he knows he shouldn’t give up, he can’t help feeling like he deserves a bit of respite. 

_“It’s not working,”_ a voice crackles in his ear. It’s Hackett, he realizes. He forgot about the open comms. That great weight moves, but in the opposite direction. _“The arms aren’t opening.”_

He isn’t done. His muscles tear, his body bleeds, his bones scream at him to sit still, and yet he gets up. His hands leave bloody hand prints across the smooth tile underneath him and every movement is like hot coals raking over open wounds, but he gets up. 

“What do you need me to do?” 

The words burn as he speaks them, scraping up his throat like so many nails. Standing is impossible, his legs too weak and aching to get underneath him, so he blearily tries to crawl. The comm hisses in his ear and then he hears EDI’s voice, a soothing balm like water over his soul.

_“You must input the Reaper IFF,”_ she says. His omnitool stutters to life, curling around his right forearm like a broken, affectionate cat. _“I’m sending the data. It’s the only way to ensure the Reapers are all disabled.”_

“It’ll kill them?” he says. 

_“Yes. It will identify them specifically, instead of unilaterally destroying all synthetic life. Please, Shepard.”_

_I’m proud of you._

He knows how to take an order. He trusts EDI, trusts her newfound humanity, and with a flick of his wrist, he downloads the Reaper IFF to the console standing above him. It beeps a pleasant tone, then goes dark, sinking into the floor with a hiss. 

And then the Citadel creaks with an almighty quake, a deep, rolling hum that shakes him to his hands and knees. He crawls back next to Anderson, propping himself up and turning to watch as the arms of the Citadel swing wide, like petals on a flower, opening up to the great vastness of the solar system and beyond. 

It takes a long time, seconds passing into minutes. Reapers wheel away from the arms like water sliding over oil, their great red beams swinging to catch prey that avoids them as well. Bright explosions dot the great black every once in a while, little orange and white and red flowers in a sea of twinkling stars, lives extinguished with every single one. He watches, awestruck, as the arms of the Citadel fold away from his vision, and once they do, the ground underneath him shakes again with a _boom._

And then, it all goes dark. Muted. The comm in his ear is quiet, the Citadel around him goes silent, and finally the ache in him dies. 

_I’m proud of you._

——

“I’m proud of you.”

He means it. He does. With every fibre of his being, he means it, and even when everything goes dark, and something in him dies, he means it. He could never not be proud of Shepard, proud of what he’s done, proud of what he’s become. There’s never a moment lived where he’s not proud of Shepard, and he hopes, in that quiet, painful moment between them, Shepard understands. 

He wakes thinking those four words, delirious and confused as he is. He wakes saying them, a hoarse croak that his attending nurse drowns with cold water. “I’m proud of you,” he says, and the look on the nurse’s face is enough to send him smiling despite the pain.

He’s proud when he finally gets to look out the window and see that the world didn’t end. He’s proud when Hackett finds him, settling a calloused, warm hand on his knee, smiling the first real smile he’s seen on that old face in half a decade. He’s proud when a young Lieutenant comes stumbling into his room professing a love so honest and great he wonders how Shepard’s managed to touch so many lives so honestly and still held the galaxy together by sheer force of will alone. 

He’s proud even when he’s allowed to see Shepard for the first time since the Citadel, allowed to see the man sleeping instead of curled over the bleeding wound in his stomach, slumped and tired and finally, finally accepting death as it is. He’s proud when he touches that scarred face, proud when he counts the new scars, proud when he gets to see those cool blue eyes after going so long thinking he’d never see them again.

There’s so many ways he’s proud, so many things he could say that fill him with a pride so hot and strong he wonders how Hannah Shepard keeps it all inside. He undergoes physical therapy, kicks his own ass twice as hard as the Reapers did just to see the man he isn’t reluctant to call a son find the will to live on his own. He finds strength in the pride he sees in Shepard, too, finds his own will when this man he’s shared so much heartbreak with allows him to see the soft core of himself, too.

“I’m proud of you,” he says to Kane, a whisper in a hushed room, his hand curling over Kane’s rumpled hair as he groggily blinks away the sedatives that kept him under for so long. 

“I’m proud of you,” he says, and instead of darkness reaching up to receive him, it’s Kane instead, and he thinks, _yes, I know you’re proud of me, too._

——

The _Normandy_ is quiet. 

She still hums, and vibrates, and whistles and groans. She’s done all she could, carried them from firefight to firefight, endured and outlasted, cherished and protected. She’s fought her fight, and will continue to, but now, in the wake of nothing and everything, she is still. 

They don’t know what to do. She sees it on their faces, in the way they look to her for direction as everything around them grinds to a sudden halt. Years of fighting, of biting, of pulling and pushing and taking and taking and _taking,_ it stills, frozen like a snapshot, and all at once they look to her. 

“Find Shepard,” is all she says. And all at once, like a lance alighted from her hand, they move.

Joker pulls them through the silent corpses looming through space, maneuvers them through this sudden graveyard with deft hands and quiet commands. The Alliance cruisers drifting through it all give them passage, struck silent and confused as well, and she can see through the port and starboard windows on _Normandy_ ’s nose the chaos that will soon ensue once everyone realizes the Reapers are dead.

For now, _Normandy_ slips quiet through it all, their voices carrying up to her in hushed wonder. Hackett’s voice is there too, instructing them to rendezvous, and with a silent nod, Joker takes them to meet him.

Garrus joins her, battered as he is, the thick hide over his neck and face scratched with new, blue wounds. She touches his shoulder as he comes to rest next to her, leaning against the bulkhead separating the bridge from the CIC corridor. He leans into her, a great warm weight, and in the same movement she slips an arm around his thin waist.

“Chakwas shouldn’t have let you go,” she murmurs quietly. 

Garrus’ good mandible flicks in amusement. “I want to be here to find him too. You don’t get all the credit, Williams.”

She huffs a sad laugh. He leans down, and she leans up, pressing their foreheads together in a turian kiss. He’d done this with Shepard, too, when they’d seen him off as the _Normandy_ came to grab them. She finds that she isn’t jealous, and he leans further into her before straightening again. He loves Shepard, too, but she’d be hard pressed to find anyone on this ship that didn’t, herself included. 

_Normandy_ leads the way through the debris after meeting up with Hackett’s cruiser, a slow-moving entourage as the bigger ship behind them struggles not to hit floating debris and Reaper corpses. Garrus grows impatient, but then, he isn’t the only one - Liara, Chakwas, Tali, James, they all come up to the bridge to watch in stunned silence. Cortez is notably absent, but one long look from James dashes the thought from her mind. 

She knows what it means to want to be alone in moments like this, to seek refuge in quiet instead of friends. She’d done the same two years ago, and to see it happen again right in front of her nearly drives her to do the same.

But Garrus isn’t backing down, so neither does she. The Citadel comes into sight, its great arms closing, a massive mess that she isn’t looking forward to cleaning up. But they’re alive, and the Reapers aren’t, and that gives her enough hope to try. 

When they dock, she decides to stay behind. Garrus looks at her oddly, mandibles tight to his face and one brow plate raised imperceptibly. EDI, Liara, and James have already departed, and beyond the _Normandy_ ’s airlock, she can see Hackett looking on expectantly. 

She runs a hand down Garrus’ cowl and smiles, trying to appear strong and normal. “You go,” she says. “I’ll be here with the _Normandy._ They need a captain right now.”

Realization clears Garrus’ expression, and he nods. She won’t leave them again, not like she did all those years ago, not like she nearly had mere months ago. She won’t abandon this ship again, not now that she’s here, where she belongs. She won’t betray Shepard like that ever again, and when Garrus turns to join the search party without a word, she knows she made the right choice.

——

It is still the right choice when they bring Shepard aboard, broken and bloody and unconscious. 

It is still the right choice when the panic wells up inside her, a great weight pushing up, pushing through, forcing orders out of her mouth, a stilted, wrecked voice that she barely recognizes as her own. 

It is still the right choice when, through it all, she can see Joker holding it together, biting his lip through the tears she sees him trying to hide; the heartbreak plain on Liara’s face as she no doubt tries to accommodate the guilt they all feel for leaving Shepard alone; the anger coursing through them all, in every single one of them that’s been here since the beginning. 

She sees it, how they bottle it up, use it as fuel for the fires kept lit for Shepard. He hasn’t let them down, not even in his final moments, and in absolution, they will not, either.


End file.
